Joan Mitchell Foundation

This spring and summer, we’re taking a deep look at the practices of the 2025 Joan Mitchell Fellows—15 artists supported by Mitchell’s legacy through five-year Fellowships—through our In the Studio interview series. You can find all the interviews on our website in the Journal. Follow along for excerpts shared here over the coming months. #JoanMitchellFellows #InTheStudio #ArtistInterview

Eric-Paul Riege #InTheStudio: “I live and work and was born and raised in Gallup, NM, which is a border town in northwest New Mexico and surrounded by Navajo Nation rez. It’s a place with many complex N8V stories, bodies, identities, and crafts, experienced and shown in these beautiful and celebratory [BUT also-] extractive and violent ways. My work in a lot of ways is about this place. “My studio now is connected to two of my homes. I can see them all right now. My childhood home is right there and my home with my family is right here and my studio is over there. “I’ve become somewhat of an organized hoarder as I get older. (Is that an oxymoron?) I save everything. Objects are so charged with our own experience with them but also in their own experience just being in the world among us. I think about the nomadic way materials travel and are touched. I want them to continue being touched by others. “My hands know more than my brain does and I let them lead. Listening to them is nice because I just kind of jump in for the ride and let them play. Naashnè ! I AM PLAYING ! Naniné ! U R PLAYING ! Neiiné ! WE R PLAYING !” 🔗 Follow link in bio for the full interview with 2025 Joan Mitchell Fellow @ericpaulriege . Look for his solo exhibition at @henryartgallery in Seattle through October 25. Pictured here: 1 - Eric-Paul Riege 2 - Quote by Eric-Paul Riege 3 - Eric-Paul Riege, + [pronounced t’], 2021. Mixed fibers and materials, installation view of Prospect.5 triennial, Yesterday we said tomorrow at the Contemporary Art Center in New Orleans, LA. 4 - Eric Paul Riege, Naabeehó Bináhásdzo Bidah Naat’a’í [Navajo Nation flag] 2017. Non-dyed sheep wool yarn, hand-dyed sheep wool yarn, gifted wool yarn from 1967, wax string, Navajo warp, 62 x 38 inches. 5 - Eric-Paul Riege, …oo-O-oo-O-oo-O-oo-O-oo-O-oo-O-oo-O-oo-O-oo-O-oo-O-oo…, 2023. Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney and the Foundation Cartier pour l’art contemporain with support from Terra Foundation for American Art. Installation view, 24th Biennale of Sydney, Ten Thousand Suns, 2024, White Bay Power Station. Photograph: Document Photography. #JoanMitchellFellows #EricPaulRiege

#InTheStudio with Eric-Paul Riege: “I am a descendent of weavers and fiber artists extending back to Na'ashjé'ii Asdzáá (Spider Woman), a Holy Person who protects Diné peoples and taught us how to weave. My work celebrates and carries forward this ancestral knowledge from my maternal family. Carrying is such an intimate gesture—one of the most kind I feel like one can have for another—so it excites me that I am a student of fiber for the rest of my life. I’m blessed to get to carry weaving through making and unmaking. Weaving is a continual celebration of survival. “I was told by one of my grandmothers that we adorn our body with jewelry so our Holy People can find and follow us, and that our jewelry is listening and feeling with us. I began making large textile earrings as totems of memory called jaatloh4Ye’iitsoh, meaning ‘ear rope for the big gods/monsters,’ which mimics and embellishes the traditional looped form of stacked beads. “My soft sculptures hang to create immersive installations of welcome that suggest a home or hooghan (the ceremonial place). These spaces are charged with the spirit and memories of the gifts I have been given to become spaces of refuge that I perform within. The loom itself is technically the first home of a weaving, so the walls of my installations are often exaggerated Navajo looms. Homes exist externally and internally, physically and figuratively, and these homes welcome all to enter, look, and stay. They are our sanctuary to share.” 🔗 Follow link in bio for the full interview with @ericpaulriege . Look for his solo exhibition at @henryartgallery in Seattle through October 25. Captions / comments in first comment. #JoanMitchellFellows #EricPaulRiege

Sammy Seung-min Lee #InTheStudio: “I recently opened ‘Becoming Motherland’ at @MCA _Denver. The exhibition includes new work from my Fulbright year in Seoul, which was incredibly inspiring and also raised a lot of complicated questions. ‘Becoming Motherland’ explores the difference between 'motherland' as something inherited and 'home' as something we create. “One of the pieces in the show is a karaoke installation with dual screens, one showing drives through Colorado, the other through Seoul. An airline seat becomes a karaoke station. The song is ‘Moonlight on the Colorado,’ an American folk song from the 1930s that became popular in Korea, likely through US military presence. Because of this song, for my parents’ generation, Colorado became this almost mythical place, an imagined utopia… This piece really came out of asking the question, while I was in Korea, ‘Why am I living in Denver?’ From my ironic perspective, it's like I fulfilled my mom's dream by living here, living in her utopia. “Another installation, ‘Dumpling Diaspora,’ grew out of the dumpling dinners I host at my studio. Dumplings exist across many cultures, including Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Indian samosas, and Eastern European pierogies. The piece is a wall of clay dumplings that reflects migration and transformation across borders. It is also, quite simply, a lot of dumplings, which makes me happy. “With ‘Becoming Motherland’ and my work more broadly, I hope it functions as both a mirror and a whisper, allowing people to see themselves reflected while also reconsidering their perspectives. For Korean American audiences, I hope it offers recognition with complexity. For other immigrant communities, I believe the emotional architecture, including longing, translation, misalignment, and humor, is widely shared. We all carry traces of somewhere else, and we are all, in our own ways, inventing home as we go.” 🔗 Follow link in bio for the full interview with 2025 Joan Mitchell Fellow @sammy_seungmin_lee , and look for her solo exhibition at @MCA_Denver (pictured here) through July 5. #JoanMitchellFellows #SammySeungminLee

#InTheStudio with 2025 Joan Mitchell Fellow Sammy Seung-min Lee: “Through materials and objects, I explore migration, memory, and belonging. Having lived in Korea and the United States, I’m especially interested in that in-between space, where identity, language, and the idea of home are always shifting and sometimes refusing to settle down. “Living in diaspora means you’re constantly negotiating where you belong. That tension can feel uncomfortable at times, but for me it’s also incredibly generative. Art gives me a way to sit inside that complexity and translate it into form. Some of my works reflect memories of my mother and my own motherhood raising two sons. Others look at migration and journey, such as sculptural castings made from luggage contents. I’m also thinking about diasporic histories, and how materials, stories, and cultural practices travel across borders and evolve over time. “My main studio is in Denver’s Santa Fe Art District. It is a space that constantly shifts depending on what I am working on. Because I use so many materials, including paper, clay, silicone, textiles, and electronics, you might see paper-skins drying on racks, molds on the floor, or half-finished objects waiting to be cast. It is messy, but it is my favorite place in the world. “I also run Collective SML | k, a project space that supports Asian and Asian-American artists through residencies and community programming. I often collaborate with local institutions to host visiting artists and scholars, offering them a place to stay and a chance to connect more deeply with the Denver community. I also host dumpling parties, because some of the best artist talks happen over food rather than in formal settings. “I have a secondary studio in my basement with bookbinding equipment such as a guillotine, presses, and a printer. This is the less dusty side of my practice. It is also practical. With kids and unpredictable schedules, it allows me to keep working from home when needed.” 🔗 Follow link in bio for the full interview with @sammy_seungmin_lee . Captions / credits in first comment.

Troy Montes Michie #InTheStudio: “My process usually begins from a place of intuition and curiosity, but it is through literature and research that things become persistent. And that persistence almost always leads me to the archive. I spent a lot of time at the public library as a kid and that feeling never left me. Getting lost in whatever catches my eye. I am not typically beginning with a predetermined image or concept. I am building a counter narrative, drawing connections amongst varied histories, spending time with what is there and what is missing. “I hope people feel the weight of the silences in my work as much as the presence of the images. And I hope for recognition, that even if someone does not share the specific histories in the work, they feel something familiar in the structure of it. We have all had to navigate what gets remembered and what gets erased. We have all had to decide what to carry and what to put down. “What sustains the work is what sustains me: the continued necessity of preserving what might otherwise disappear. Preservation can be as simple as the act of remembering. The longing to know the lands, histories, and traditions my people come from. That longing sits inside what Aimé Césaire described as a cosmic anger. Not rage for its own sake but the fury of dispossession transformed into creativity. Transformation is how the narrative gets rewritten.” 🔗 Follow link in bio for the full interview with @troymmichie , a 2025 Joan Mitchell Fellow. Pictured here: 1: Troy Montes Michie, "Knickknacks," 2025. Cut paper, photograph, thread, acrylics on paper, magazine pages, ink, graphite paper, staples, and clip, 25 × 25 inches. 2: Quote from Troy Montes Michie 3: Troy Montes Michie, "Wind in the Cane," 2025 (detail). Cut paper and magazine pages, photograph, photo corners, ink, conté crayon, thread, and acrylics on paper, 37 x 37 inches 4 + 5: Installation view of Troy Montes Michie’s exhibition "The Jawbone Sings Blue," @kunsthallebasel , 2026. #JoanMitchellFellows #TroyMontesMichie

#InTheStudio with 2025 Joan Mitchell Fellow Troy Montes Michie: “I am interested in the gaze. Who is looking, who is being looked at, and on whose terms. The communities I come from have been fetishized, erased, and spectacularized by systems that were never designed to grant them autonomy. My work moves against that. Through collage, assemblage, drawing, and archived histories, I am trying to disrupt those visual modes of consumption. “I keep returning to the space between the erotic and the elegiac, the way desire and mourning occupy the same territory, especially for Black and queer subjects. Images that were made to solicit desire for Black male bodies—how they circulated, who consumed them—carry a weight that demands a response. What does it mean to take those images back, to reclothe them, to redirect their force—not to sanitize or suppress the erotic charge but to refuse the terms under which it was originally organized? “My newest body of work grows from an encounter with the fragmented archive of sculptor Richmond Barthé, a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance. In his incomplete scrapbook, I found a form that holds something I return to in my practice: the way people and histories can be simultaneously invisible and hypervisible, desired and erased. “There was a sadness in Barthé's scrapbooks, the particular grief of a life edited for survival—the story shaped around what the world is willing to receive—that made me think about the ways queer people cannot tell their true stories due to normative respectability politics. The photographs of clergy members and the church were a testament to his faith, but there were so many missing photos. Only the mounting tabs remain, like landmarks or markers on the black page.” 🔗 Follow link in bio for the full interview with @troymmichie . Pictured here: 1: Troy Montes Michie, photo by Christian DeFonte 2: Quote from Troy Montes Michie 3: Troy Montes Michie, Brotherhood, 2025 4: Troy Montes Michie, To Keep His Commandments and Statutes, 2024 (detail) 5: Troy Montes Michie, Three is Company, 2025 (detail) 6: Work in progress in Troy Montes Michie’s studio #JoanMitchellFellows #TroyMontesMichie

In April at the Fondation Cartier: Joan Mitchell and poetry, a gallery talk with Leanne Sacramone and Mara Hoberman, April 2, 18:00.⁣ Info & agenda (link in bio) — En avril à la Fondation Cartier : Joan Mitchell et la poésie, avec Leanne Sacramone et Mara Hoberman, 2 avril, 18:00. Info & agenda (lien en bio) @fondationcartier @leannesacramone @mara.hoberman

📣 Help us spread the word! We are now accepting applications for 2027 visual artist residencies at the Joan Mitchell Center. The application deadline is May 29.🗓️ ✅ To be eligible to apply, artists must either be based in New Orleans (for the last five years) or native to New Orleans, or be a former grant recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation based anywhere in the United States. Former Artists-in-Residence of the Center are not eligible to apply. See further eligibility details on our website. 🎨 Selected artists will receive private studio space at the Center for 10 weeks in either the Spring or Fall 2027 residency sessions or for 6 weeks during the Summer 2027 session. Artists-in-Residence also receive a $150 weekly stipend, weekday communal meals, and opportunities to participate in professional development and community events. 🔗 Follow the link in bio to our website to learn more about the program, access the online application, and read the detailed guidelines and FAQs. We’ll be hosting a virtual info session and campus tours to answer all your questions: 💻 Virtual info session: Wednesday, April 15, 3pm CT 👣 Campus tours: April 16 & 17 👥 One-on-one application support session available by appointment May 4-28 Registration links and all details on our website (🔗 in bio). -- Pictured here: Artist-in-Residence Ivelisse Jiménez working in a studio at the Joan Mitchell Center, 2025. Photo by Cfreedom Photography. #joanmitchellcenter #artistresidency #opencall #nolaartist #joanmitchellfoundation

In the last years of her life, Joan Mitchell’s work became even more closely tied to nature. The line between abstraction and representation became more porous as she continued to try new ideas and methods. Direct points of reference became more recognizable, particularly trees and sunflowers, which she had painted and titled works after since the mid-1950s. Other works, such as "Merci" (slides 1 and 2), balance vast areas of unpainted canvas with spare clusters of boldly agitated marks, creating affecting compositions with minimal means. Mitchell painted "Merci" in 1992, the same year that she passed away from cancer. This work and other late paintings demonstrate her commitment to continuing to experiment and paint, on a grand and masterful scale, through her final days. Pictured here: 1, 2 - Joan Mitchell, Merci, 1992. Oil on canvas, 110 1/4 x 141 1/2 inches (280.035 x 359.41 cm). Collection of Joan Mitchell Foundation. © Estate of Joan Mitchell. 3 - From left: Untitled (1992), Sunflowers (1990-91), No Birds (1987) installed in the Joan Mitchell retrospective at Baltimore Museum of Art. Photo by Mitra Hood. 4 - Joan Mitchell in her garden in Vétheuil, France, 1991. Photo by David Turnley/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images.

Now available: “Transatlantique – Joan Mitchell,” the latest volume of the bilingual (French/English) series wherein contemporary artists share their unique perspectives on historic artists with ties to either side of the Atlantic. From the publisher, ER Publishing (@elodieschalit ): “Joan Mitchell (1925–1992), one of the most important artists of the post-war period, is also a uniquely transatlantic figure. From the 1950s onward, as Mitchell shuttled back and forth between the United States and France, her work—and the discourse around it—developed across two continents, two cultures, and two languages. Invited by @Mara.Hoberman , a Paris-based writer and the senior researcher for the Joan Mitchell Catalogue Raisonné, nine artists who are themselves based on either side of the Atlantic reflect on Mitchell’s life, work and enduring impact.” Edited by Hoberman, “Transatlantique – Joan Mitchell” includes contributions by Kamrooz Aram (@kamroozegar ), @Am élie_Bertrand, Stéphane Bordarier, Robert Longo (@robert_longo_studio ), @Fr édérique.Lucien, Carmen Neely (@carmeneliz ), Joanne Robertson (@joannemaryrobertson ), Megan Rooney, and @Jongsuk_Yoon . In an essay framed as a letter to Mitchell, Amélie Bertrand writes: “You brilliantly encapsulated what all painters know: ‘What excites me as I paint, is what one color is doing to another and what they are doing in terms of space and doing to each other.’ But am I wrong in thinking that you are more interested in exploring the clash of colors than harmony?” Follow link in bio for purchase info via the distributor, les presses du réel (@l_pd_r ). Captions/credits: first comment. -- À propos de Transatlantique – Joan Mitchell : Joan Mitchell (1925-1992), l'une des artistes les plus importantes de l'après-guerre, est aussi une figure résolument transatlantique. À partir des années 1950, alors que Mitchell circule entre les États-Unis et la France, son œuvre, et le discours qui l'entoure, se développent à travers deux continents, deux cultures et deux langues. À l'invitation de Mara Hoberman, neuf artistes, vivant de part et d'autre de l'Atlantique, portent leurs regards sur sa vie, son œuvre et son influence durable.

→ EN RÉSIDENCE ⁠ ⁠ ↘ L'artiste Teneille Prosper @tee_thee_artist est en résidence pour trois mois à la Cité internationale des arts, avec le soutien de son partenaire historique, la Ville de Paris, ainsi que de la Joan Mitchell Foundation et du Joan Mitchell Center avec l’objectif d’encourager la recherche, le dialogue et les échanges internationaux au cœur de Paris.⁠ ⁠ Née en 1977 à Nouvelle-Orléans, Teneille Prosper développe une pratique qui explore les questions d'identité culturelle, les traumatismes historiques et la lutte pour la justice sociale à travers différents médiums, dont la peinture acrylique et les techniques mixtes.⁠ ⁠ Venez à sa rencontre durant les Ateliers ouverts du mercredi 4 mars.⁠ ⁠ ↘︎ Ateliers ouverts de la Cité internationale des arts⁠ Site du Marais⁠ 18, rue de l'Hôtel de Ville, 75004 Paris⁠ Tous les mercredis, 18h – 21h⁠ Entrée libre⁠ ⁠ --⁠ ⁠ → IN RESIDENCE⁠ ⁠ ↘ Teneille Prosper @tee_thee_artist is in residence for three months at the Cité internationale des arts, supported by our longstanding partner, the City of Paris, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation, and the Joan Mitchell Center, as part of a programme aiming to foster research and international dialogue in the heart of Paris.⁠ ⁠ Originally from New Orleans and born in 1977, Teneille Prosper explores race, gender, sexuality, violence, and identity in her work. Recurring themes include racism and inequality, which she explores through various media, including acrylic painting and mixed media.⁠ ⁠ Come and meet her during the Open Studios on Wednesday, March 4.⁠ ⁠ ↘︎ Open Studios⁠ Marais site⁠ 18, rue de l'Hôtel de Ville, 75004 Paris⁠ Every Wednesday, 6–9 pm⁠ Free admission⁠ ⁠ Cité internationale des arts © Maurine Tric / Adagp, Paris, 2026⁠